The Reef is Dying - Almost Everywhere

[Mr.Maska]

we the people need to have some coral values!. cheers for captive bred and aquacultured!

 

[cortez marine]

Yes,
Charge all you chat room, laptop warriors!
The exporter cartels tremble at your every mouse click!:worried:

I'm sorry. Forgive me.
This is a long running melodrama and of the 5% of the hobbyists who claim to care , only about .05 % would actually put their money where their mouth is. Thats an empiracle observation.

About 10 million bucks was spent on the notion of certifying fish sources and educating the consumer already. But, it got itself spent to little acclaim, great frustration, lotsa forums, conferences, perks, plane rides, per diems, salaries [ some in 6 figures] , new computers, office supplies [but little field supplies] and yet the reform loop comes around every few years like a lunar eclipse.

Since changing buying behavior is out of the question....[ specially in a reccession] and since funds raised tend to shrink and get squandered before any change point occurs....what else should be tried?

Seriously, I dont see a serious reform effort without genuinely concerned people and there are just too few of them in all levels of concern.
The least effort at change has been the hobby sector and its knee jerk pop environmentalism.
The 2nd least sincere the funding sector that gave money for tax exemption duty but cared little how it went.
A few village mayors in the Philippines have done more then all the non aquarium people looting the issue and feeding at the trough in the past decade.

This aquarium reform thing coulda been easy. But it was waylaid...hijacked as it were by public relations and image concerned funders of large corporate interests.
Our reform movement became a bookkeeping scandal and a tax write off phenomena.

It was treason to the reefs actually....and went forward with little resistance.
Steve

 

[arhyne]

Steve, how does one ever reach the other 95 to 99.95%?

 

[cortez marine]

This is an intelligence test;
Re-train 2000 cyanide fishers in the Philippines and Indonesia
or
Or think you can re-train 250,000 + bargain hunting consumers in HK, Japan, Europe and the USA..

Which makes more sense?
Why give morally nuetral and detached people a choice?
Its far easier to convert the limited community of cyanide fisherman then the worldwide consumer mass.
Then,
Much of the problem disappears.

But, money for training was all squandered and wasted by the intelligent, environmentally concerned organizations that fed off and then abandoned the issue.
If they wouldn't choose wisely and for the environment, why would you expect the consumer to?

Only the divers are reacheable.
They will change as has already been proven.
It would cost a fraction of what was wasted already.

Local trainers are all available and remain un-utilized.

We are the real problem.
Divers will change ...we won't.
The token few concerned middle class hobbyists dont add up to much.
Steve

 

[arhyne]

I never saw it as much of a fisher issue, more of an exporter/importer issue as enablers.

 

[cortez marine]

I agree,
The business people initially people made the poison available and sold it directly against invoices of the diver.
Then, as that was exposed....they fronted small drums of cyanide or money to their middlemen to get it.
Divers themselves have had a hard time to come up with the scratch to buy the drums to break down into kilos for sale and distribution.
The exporters have always imagined they were fooling everyone.
The truth is , the American and European importers always knew....but, convinced themselves they were "not in the loop" and blamed everything on handling and ammonia.
The cyanide killed hundreds of thousands of coral heads.....far more then the world will ever frag.
Steve

 

[Pinkskunk]

so i propose the international communities put a ban on exporting marine fishes altogether, only corals are allowed. problems solved?

you see, no one buy fishes, no one will catch fishes, and since you dont catch fishes, you dont use explosive.

yes i know it's crazy and stupid and it will never happen in reality, therefore the reef will continue to die off and my grand children would know about the reef as i have with dinasours.

 

[Cuervo]

I can't believe what people did to the giant reef that used to cover death valley, and the one that used to cover the alps was equally magnificent.. the travesty of it all. and the poor poor Megaladon. freaking global warming and overfishing.

 

[ackee]

The ancient reefs you reference developed and were destroyed by natural processes over vast geologic time. The destruction wrought by humans will probably be meaningless after humans finally vanish and the planet heals as it slowly changes. New landforms, new oceans, new species evolving, new reefs, all of these things will happen. Of course, it will take millions of years, and it is unlikely that any human eye will see these changes. In the meantime, the once rich natural world that existed when I was a boy is substantially gone.

Our individual lives are only a tiny speck of time, but that's all we have. The restructuring of the planet will continue to occur slowly, and the damage people have done will endure for the relatively short period humans continue to exist. The planet eventually will shrug off the damage, but that is cold comfort to those of us who miss what once was, however ephemeral we and the world as we know it may be.

 

[Ntvper]

I can't believe what people did to the giant reef that used to cover death valley, and the one that used to cover the alps was equally magnificent.. the travesty of it all. and the poor poor Megaladon. freaking global warming and overfishing.

how can u contribute that to human interaction? based on scientists that was turned up to 350 million years ago....long before man was on the Earth. not that i believe that or the scientists. I do however believe we are impacting our oceans and reefs today with the import/export trade of the saltwater hobby. personally i buy ORA or at the very least MAC stuff long before anything just 'wild' caught. my lil footprint is small compared to the masses but at least its a start.

link to show click here

 

[alton]

Looking at the post this is what I get from it;
Too many people on this earth so get rid of half of them.
People and sharks compete for the same fish for food, so save a fish, eat a shark (I added this one)
Loss of corals due to over collecting? Didn't we have a sumani wave wipe out millions of coral and yet a couple of years later they are all back?
We can't go across the world telling everyone what to do, we are already do that to a certain extent and that is why some countries hate us. Some things we can control, some we can not.

 

[Cuervo]

The ancient reefs you reference developed and were destroyed by natural processes over vast geologic time. The destruction wrought by humans will probably be meaningless after humans finally vanish and the planet heals as it slowly changes. New landforms, new oceans, new species evolving, new reefs, all of these things will happen. Of course, it will take millions of years, and it is unlikely that any human eye will see these changes. In the meantime, the once rich natural world that existed when I was a boy is substantially gone.

Our individual lives are only a tiny speck of time, but that's all we have. The restructuring of the planet will continue to occur slowly, and the damage people have done will endure for the relatively short period humans continue to exist. The planet eventually will shrug off the damage, but that is cold comfort to those of us who miss what once was, however ephemeral we and the world as we know it may be.

Exactly, the destruction wrought by humans is insignificant when looking at the whole picture. Man's ego is what makes him think he has any impact on the earch whatsoever. Same as our ego had us convinced that the universe revolved around us, which was the general consensus for centuries.

Mass media and politicians go on and on about CO2 this and Co2 that, and it's bs. Mankind is responsible for a measley 3% of the total amount of Co2 that gets injected into the atmosphere, and as nearly as we can tell that means nothing to the world's oceans. Most of us can't even control the CO2 injection into our tanks to an accuracy of 3%, yet our captive reefs still manage to thrive.

We're making claims that we're doing something to the earth's closed system based on what we see over such a short period of time, and the truth is we have no idea what, if any, impact we're having. It's like trying to predict a nascar race when you get a 2 second long video clip somewhere in the middle of it.

Certainly we have an impact in localized areas, but our impact on the system as a whole is nil. The earth system is far more robust that we give it credit for.

 

[greenbean36191]

Man's ego is what makes him think he has any impact on the earch whatsoever.

Measuring man's impact on the Earth is what makes us think we have an impact.

Mankind is responsible for a measley 3% of the total amount of Co2 that gets injected into the atmosphere, and as nearly as we can tell that means nothing to the world's oceans.

That means a whole lot to the world's oceans as nearly as we can tell. That 3% is on top of a system that was already roughly in equilibrium with the other 97%- i.e. if it weren't for the oceans capacity to take up about half of our 3% addition we would be out of balance by 3%. That means about 1.5% of the CO2 produced every year now accumulates in the atmosphere while about half of what we produce every year goes into the oceans, shifting the carbonate buffer system towards bicarbonate. Last time similar chemical changes happened, it meant the end of all reefbuilding for several million years, the extinction of one of the main groups of reef-builders, and the near-extinction of corals (they essentially disappear from the fossil record at that time). That meant a whole lot to the ocean's ecosystems.

Most of us can't even control the CO2 injection into our tanks to an accuracy of 3%, yet our captive reefs still manage to thrive.

We also regulate alkalinity in our tanks. The ocean doesn't except on geologic timescales.

We're making claims that we're doing something to the earth's closed system based on what we see over such a short period of time, and the truth is we have no idea what, if any, impact we're having. It's like trying to predict a nascar race when you get a 2 second long video clip somewhere in the middle of it.

I think you seriously misunderstand how we know about the impacts we're having. For one, we're not just spotting trends over a few years and assuming we're the cause.

We'll stick to CO2 for example. How do we know it's causing a problem and that we're to blame? For one, we know that the ocean is acidifying from the top down, which immediately rules out undersea sources like volcanoes and tells us the input is from the top of the ocean. Then we can measure the isotopic signature of that carbon in the upper layers of the ocean. The carbon from burning fossil fuels is chemically different from carbon sources like volcanoes and decaying plants. When you measure that isotopic ratio in the oceans, it shows that the main contributor of additional carbon is the burning of fossil fuels. It's not coming from the decay of plants or from volcanoes, and since we're the only major source of fossil fuel combustion, we can trace that carbon in the oceans back to humans based on its fingerprint.

We've also worked backwards and measured the increase in CO2 in the air and calculated how much CO2 will dissolve in seawater and the effects that will have on the carbonate chemistry based on the concentration in the air. These are a very straightforward set of equations that you can solve without even using a calculator if you have to (I had to do it when I took marine chem). These same equations have served oceanographers well for close to a century now, so we know they work. The answers from those equations tells us how things should change in the ocean if increasing atmospheric CO2 is the source, and those predictions match the real-world measurements.

We know that those changes are a problem because we can measure their effects in microcosm- highly controlled closed systems. We can for example, pump carefully controlled amounts of CO2 into the air above a sealed aquarium full of coral and see what happens to them. Except in a few experiments where alkalinity is artificially kept constant, their calcification slows and eventually stops. To rule out the possibility that there's some mechanism that we can't reproduce in an aquarium that would counteract that effect we also look at prehistoric reefs to see what happened to them when the ocean's chemistry changed. We can measure things like the ratio of magnesium and calcium in their skeletons and the form of CaCO3 (calcite or aragonite) they produced and determine the chemistry of the water they grew in. What we see are several periods where there is high pH and aragonite is favored. When atmospheric CO2 increases and the pH drops, we see species that produce aragonite disappear, sometimes being replaced by calcitic species. Other times, things get bad enough that aragonitic and calcitic species both largely disappear, which tells us that the abundance and makeup of reefs is closely tied to seawater chemistry just like in our microcosms.

 

[L33t Reefer]

this thread makes me sad

 

[philosophile]

I don't want to completely hijack this thread, but I've heard that snorkling and scuba diving is damaging reefs via oils/sunscreen/etc on us polluting the immediate waters, not to mention accidental kicking etc.

Any truth to this?

 

[greenbean36191]

Yes, there are lots of well documented cases of divers doing major damage to reefs by kicking corals, dragging their gauges, stirring up sediment, and touching the corals. A good example is on the Israeli coast of the Red Sea. Scientists went out and did surveys of the health of the reef at different dive sites and then compared that to the number of dives done at each site and showed that the more divers that use a site, the more likely it is to be in bad shape. They also shadowed divers as they they dove and kept track of the number of times they damaged the reef per dive. As a result, the Israeli government took action to limit the number of divers using each site and the reef began to recover some (they had other issues that slowed their recovery, like the presence of large fish farms, which they've only addressed more recently). The dive operators actually ended up making more money because the reefs looked better and since there were a limited number of dive opportunities, they could charge more per trip.

Similar work was done just down the coast in Egypt, and IIRC it's been done in Belize and the Cayman Islands as well, though I don't know if it's resulted in increased regulation in any of those places.

As far as sunscreen goes, no one has ruled it out as a potential issue, but there's no good evidence that it has any impact. There was one paper published on the subject a few years back that made big news in the popular press and even resulted in some resorts banning sunscreen, but in the marine science community it was heavily criticized due to serious methodological flaws. For one, the authors didn't even measure sunscreen levels on the reef or in any other marine environment. Their only measurement of sunscreen in the water was from a freshwater lake that's a popular swimming spot. For their experiments they then exposed corals to sunscreen chemicals at 10x those measured in the lake and the corals bleached- which is no surprise. At those types of concentrations even relatively non-toxic compounds like sugar will also cause bleaching. We can't infer anything about the risk of sunscreen exposure to corals in nature based on their findings. I don't know of anyone who considers it a serious issue though.

 

[Cuervo]

Measuring man's impact on the Earth is what makes us think we have an impact.


That means a whole lot to the world's oceans as nearly as we can tell. That 3% is on top of a system that was already roughly in equilibrium with the other 97%- i.e. if it weren't for the oceans capacity to take up about half of our 3% addition we would be out of balance by 3%. That means about 1.5% of the CO2 produced every year now accumulates in the atmosphere while about half of what we produce every year goes into the oceans, shifting the carbonate buffer system towards bicarbonate. Last time similar chemical changes happened, it meant the end of all reefbuilding for several million years, the extinction of one of the main groups of reef-builders, and the near-extinction of corals (they essentially disappear from the fossil record at that time). That meant a whole lot to the ocean's ecosystems.


We also regulate alkalinity in our tanks. The ocean doesn't except on geologic timescales.


I think you seriously misunderstand how we know about the impacts we're having. For one, we're not just spotting trends over a few years and assuming we're the cause.

We'll stick to CO2 for example. How do we know it's causing a problem and that we're to blame? For one, we know that the ocean is acidifying from the top down, which immediately rules out undersea sources like volcanoes and tells us the input is from the top of the ocean. Then we can measure the isotopic signature of that carbon in the upper layers of the ocean. The carbon from burning fossil fuels is chemically different from carbon sources like volcanoes and decaying plants. When you measure that isotopic ratio in the oceans, it shows that the main contributor of additional carbon is the burning of fossil fuels. It's not coming from the decay of plants or from volcanoes, and since we're the only major source of fossil fuel combustion, we can trace that carbon in the oceans back to humans based on its fingerprint.

We've also worked backwards and measured the increase in CO2 in the air and calculated how much CO2 will dissolve in seawater and the effects that will have on the carbonate chemistry based on the concentration in the air. These are a very straightforward set of equations that you can solve without even using a calculator if you have to (I had to do it when I took marine chem). These same equations have served oceanographers well for close to a century now, so we know they work. The answers from those equations tells us how things should change in the ocean if increasing atmospheric CO2 is the source, and those predictions match the real-world measurements.

We know that those changes are a problem because we can measure their effects in microcosm- highly controlled closed systems. We can for example, pump carefully controlled amounts of CO2 into the air above a sealed aquarium full of coral and see what happens to them. Except in a few experiments where alkalinity is artificially kept constant, their calcification slows and eventually stops. To rule out the possibility that there's some mechanism that we can't reproduce in an aquarium that would counteract that effect we also look at prehistoric reefs to see what happened to them when the ocean's chemistry changed. We can measure things like the ratio of magnesium and calcium in their skeletons and the form of CaCO3 (calcite or aragonite) they produced and determine the chemistry of the water they grew in. What we see are several periods where there is high pH and aragonite is favored. When atmospheric CO2 increases and the pH drops, we see species that produce aragonite disappear, sometimes being replaced by calcitic species. Other times, things get bad enough that aragonitic and calcitic species both largely disappear, which tells us that the abundance and makeup of reefs is closely tied to seawater chemistry just like in our microcosms.

The earth is a dynamic system, it shifts and swings constantly, sometimes over periods of hundreds of millions of years, sometimes far far less. It's ego that makes us think we can affect such a large system for the positive or negative. Certainly if we scale things enough, we could - ie unleash the full nuclear arsenal of all of mankind and we're going to cause a major shift in a very short period. Even all out nuclear war is fairly small in comparison to the events that caused the 5 major extinction events in earth's history though.

I argue that it's ego that makes us think we can change things faster than the earth system can compensate.

The reality is that we don't really know, and we make an awful lot of assumptions in the process of trying to sort it out. Less than 40 years ago several of the worlds leading climatoligists predicted we would be entering an iceage right now, caused by our own actions, yet now some of those same climatologists are proclaiming that we're doing the exact opposite and causing global warming.

Don't get me wrong, I am not anti-conservation. In fact, the things I state above actually make me quite pro conservation. The earth system being similar to our tanks, where the rule is, if you aren't monitoring/testing for specific things then it's best not to go adjusting them - ie don't dose calcium unless you are testing for it. I do feel though, that much like the hobby over the past 30 years, we feel as though we're testing for all the right things, but we could be very mistaken. I've even read a couple of articles recently that argue that the 3% CO2 we're adding is actually beneficial to the reefs... but until we know for sure, we should be more careful about adding it, or for that matter, taking it away.

 

[alton]

I am hearing all the problems, I am not hearing any solutions? This is I know a touchy subject and I commend all who have remained very professional. Our president wants us to use coal burning /electric cars and pay double for them? How is that going to help anything? We can't even keep up with the storm that hit Texas this week, can you imagine adding 10,000 cars sucking off of the grid? Wind energy although expensive works pretty well here in Texas, but solar has been a joke. I have seen solar systems put in and only produce half of what they advertised. Maybe if we stop sending all of our jobs to China and India we would have more money for research and development?

 

[Cuervo]

Politicians and the Mass Media take advantage of topics that hit people emotionally moreso than rationally. Many of the changes they push for seem more environmentally friendly on the outside, when in reality they are not.

This can be evidenced by the fact that we don't build more nuclear power plants in our country. Which at this point in time is cleanest power for the dollar available. Sure, there is some waste from them, but it is very very contained. (as opposed to dumped in a river or spewed into the atmosphere)

My argument above is that this same fear mongering by politicians and the media are what have us even creating topics like this one...

 

[billsreef]

Similar work was done just down the coast in Egypt, and IIRC it's been done in Belize and the Cayman Islands as well, though I don't know if it's resulted in increased regulation in any of those places.

Many of the dive sites in the Caymans are regularly rotated, with the moorings actually removed from the site being rested. The dive operators in the Caymans (and most other islands I've been too) spend a lot of time reminding divers to watch their buoyancy and not hit, touch, or drag gauges over the corals. Most also have a no gloves allowed policy to reduce the temptation to touch the reef.

It's ego that makes us think we can affect such a large system for the positive or negative.

I'd argue quite the opposite. I can find plenty of garbage offshore. The clouds of pollution hanging over major coastal cities is thick enough and high enough that I can be far enough offshore to be out of sight of land and those clouds are not only visible, but located so perfectly over those cities that I can actually take a navigational fix on their location. Due to the ability to fingerprint C isotopes, we know for a fact that Carbon emissions from China travel all the across the Pacific and impact the Rockys. I've watched local LI bays and creeks closed to shellfishing due to man's pollution. That's just for starters.

All in all, it's kind of hard to see all that and not think we have an impact on the global environment.

I am hearing all the problems, I am not hearing any solutions?

That is the hard part. Not so much the knowing what to do, but coming up solutions that both work and people find to be something they are willing to live with.